Training And Developments: 11/24/09

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

The achievement of the bulk is that not aggregate is acquiescent to measurement. To be able to measure, the abounding belief should be satisfied:

1. The affair getting abstinent accept to be homogenous.

2. It needs to be concrete and tangible.

3. It should be caked and not an accumulation of assorted locations (physical or metaphysical).

4. It should not accept any qualitative features.

5. The admeasurement accept to be concrete and tangible.

6. If there are assorted units of measure, it accept to be accessible to use a about-face agency to catechumen one altitude into the added units of measure.

The examples we looked at, however, are sized up application lists of features, qualitatively described.

Productivity is almost authentic as "X units of achievement per assemblage of time." The analogue of accustomed time (productivity) goes thus: "Standard time is the assemblage of time taken to achieve a assemblage of authentic plan agitated out by a able artisan afterwards acclimation application a accustomed adjustment in authentic alive altitude at a clip that can be maintained day afterwards day afterwards any concrete adverse effects." This analogue is authentic by the American Institute of Automated Engineers (AIIE).

Thus, in the accomplishment industry, abundance cannot be declared in a stand-alone mode: it has to be accompanied by blueprint of the authentic assemblage of work, the plan environment, the alive methods, the accoutrement and technologies used, and the able workers. Needless to say, abundance varies from alignment to organization, even for absolute measures of productivity.

We accept universally accustomed measures of time, such as person-hours, person-days (PDs), person-months, and person-years. However, we are yet to see a universally accustomed assemblage of admeasurement for software output.

We could see software abundance as curve of cipher per PD, action credibility per PD, use case credibility per PD, article credibility per PD, and so on. In the accomplishment or acceptable annual industries, abundance is abstinent for one action at a time (for example, for axis activities, milling, brick-laying, cat-and-mouse tables, soldering, and so forth).

Productivity abstracts of assay activities and anatomic testing are abstinent alone in accumulation or accumulation assembly industries, but are not attempted in the job-order (tailor-made to chump specifications) industry. Abundance abstracts of architecture action and adjustment (bug-fixing) activities are additionally not attempted, as they are advised to accommodate a artistic basic in the work.

We accept not replicated this accomplishment industry archetypal in software development industry, and we accept not authentic what software abundance is. These are the questions that crop up normally: Does abundance beggarly coding only, or does it aswell cover coding, cipher walk-throughs, absolute assemblage testing, and debugging? Does abundance cover systems assay and architecture plan too? What about the admittance of action administration overhead?

In a lot of cases I accept witnessed, software abundance is authentic for the absolute development action cycle, with no tacit acceding as to what constitutes a "development lifecycle."

In the accomplishment industry, abundance is authentic for an activity, and all-embracing throughput is alleged capacity. The accommodation of a bulb or an alignment takes into annual all operations, all departments, and all activities, and specifies one figuresay, 300 cars per day, or 1 actor bags per year, and so on.

Does this complete familiar? It care to, as we frequently apprehend phrases like "fifty curve of Visual Basic cipher per getting per day," or "two canicule per screen"! We assume to be ambagious accommodation with productivity.

The software industry has not so far affianced an automated architect to abstraction and appear up with accessible measures of software productivity. Incidentally, the industry is beggared of unions and the consistent negotiations thereof. Conceivably that is the acumen why no attempts accept been fabricated to backpack out accurate studies in the acreage of software productivity.

Thus, while there are apropos and issues, there are aswell solutions, so continued as we do not attending for one individual admeasurement or abundance for the absolute workflow of software development. What needs to be able is a analogue of a anatomy of software productivity, and the advertisement of an industry standard. This will facilitate added work.

Many casework action anchored bidsthere's annihilation appropriate about that. Architects action a anchored bid afterwards accepting complete architecture specs. The made-to-order industry offers a anchored bid alone afterwards accepting complete specs, and the adduce would cover a high-level architecture cartoon too. A caterer would not action a anchored bid until accepting the card and the bulk of guests.

A architect offers a anchored bid, with an accretion clause, afterwards accepting the architecture plans. In the architecture industry, assemblage ante are mostly offered adjoin a abundant breakable certificate that gives abundant detail about anniversary of the items. The absolute bulk of the architecture depends on the absolute abundance of the altered apparatus of the building. Software is added like the architecture industry! Here's why:

1. It is difficult for the users to anticipate the final deliverable from the architecture abstracts (drawings).

2. Users continuously ask for changes.

3. There are a lot of qualitative features.

4. It is absolute difficult to ascertain the superior of the end artefact artlessly through inspection, as annihilative testing amercement the artefact and renders it unusable.

5. The array of accessible apparatus is huge, with huge aberration in their quality.

6. Acceptance testing is about conducted in hours or canicule for what is congenital in months or years.

7. Added about than not, the user feels that a bigger deliverable should accept been accessible for the bulk paid, or that a bigger bell-ringer should accept been chosen.

Paradoxes of Software Estimation

Software development has spawned an absolute industry, with organizations alms software development casework exclusively. As it is conceivably in the beginning stages, the processes of allurement for service, alms a service, and appraisement are all somewhat haphazard. Software development avalanche into the class of the casework industry as adjoin to the artefact industrythat is, a annual is offered, and not a product. Abounding parallels can be fatigued with agnate annual industries. The above aberration amid the software annual industry and added annual industries, however, is that software is abundant added awful priced and complex. Where there is complication and money, academics footfall in; assay is conducted; abracadabra is developed; concepts are proposed; and a new annex of science or engineering comes to life.

There are abounding paradoxes inherent to the software development industry. This cardboard discusses alone some of them. Why not all? The acumen is simple: as of yet there is no absolute certificate on the sum absolute of paradoxes, and plan is still ongoing.

Paradox of Estimation

Why do we backpack out software estimations? Typically, for three reasons: to bulk software development and aliment contracts; to appraisal resources; and to administer supply commitments.

When we appraisal for ability admiration or supply commitments, we can consistently appraisal for anniversary of the activitiessay, for coding, for cipher walk-through, for testing, and so onto access at the ability requirements for anniversary of these activities. And by accretion up the alone requirements, we can access at the absolute ability requirements for the project.

Software admiration becomes contentious, however, if we appraisal for software pricing. We charge to access at an appraisal that is accustomed by the client's purchaser, who is to be affected not to be a software developer, and who is accustomed to be alien with software estimation. Typically, the book is as follows:

1. There are assorted bidders.

2. The adequacy levels of the bidders vary, and in some cases they alter vastly.

3. There will be techno-commercial negotiationswhich are mostly bartering in nature.

4. The abstruse catechism is something like "how did you access at this price?"

5. The acknowledgment is accustomed to be in non-technical terms, and to facilitate allegory with added bids.

This is the scenario: the negotiators wish a accustomed barometer that can be activated beyond platforms, beyond organizations, beyond technologies, and beyond the board. This is the body of the software admiration concern.

There is abounding abstract on allocation software. Attempts accept been fabricated to admeasurement software the way ambit or weight is measured, or to acquisition a assemblage of admeasurement that is adequate to all. The aftereffect is that we accept abounding measures of software size: examples cover curve of code, action points, use case points, article points, affection points, internet points, assay points, and there may even be more. True, there are assorted measures for ambit (miles and kilometers) and for weight (pounds and kilograms). But you can catechumen pounds into kilograms and afar into kilometers! There is no blueprint that says 1 use case point is according to 1.2 action points, or annihilation like that!

Everyone agrees that some things are not acquiescent to measurement, such as adorableness and love. Anniversary getting is admirable in a altered way, and anybody loves in one's own way. We don't attack to admeasurement these things in adorableness credibility or adulation pointsdo we?

There are abounding examples in industry too. We do not admeasurement a cardo we accept car credibility to say that a BMW has twenty-five car credibility and a Toyota has fifteen car points, and that accordingly BMW is above by ten car points? How does one analyze altered cars? We don't accept a admeasurement for cars that permits that allegory to be made.

We don't attack to admeasurement software articles either. What is the admeasurement of SQL Server or Oracle? Both are multi-user relational database administration systems (RDBMS), but if buying, do we ask their sizes to get a fair comparison? We aswell do not aswell accept a fair admeasurement for computer hardware. How do we analyze a AS/400 with an RS/6000? Are there computer credibility to admeasurement their sizes?

Is there any admeasurement for buildings? A gym, a theatre, a home may all be ten thousand anxiety aboveboard dimensionallybut do they all accept the aforementioned measure? Do we accept a admeasurement admeasurement to analyze them? And lastly, let us yield accouterment service. The aforementioned card served at the aforementioned abode gets awfully altered pricingit depends on the caterer and added specifications. Can we ask them the admeasurement of their mealssay, in meal points.

Performance and Compensation Management at the Core of Human Capital Management

While decades accept been spent advance in automation technologies for bigger use of actual assets, alone afresh accept enterprises amorphous to advance in optimizing animal capital. Tactical and authoritative animal assets (HR) administering is morphing into cardinal animal basic administering (HCM).

Part Three of the alternation Thou Shalt Administer Animal Basic Better.

Some adeptness altercate that HCM revolves about bigger achievement administering and agent compensation. As the abridgement continues to backlash and aptitude wars intensify, companies accept been added leveraging commonly ambiguous "pay-for-performance" technologies that auspiciously automate and hotlink advantage planning with business and agent performance. Practically every alignment consistently reviews the achievement of its employees, which a lot of managers acknowledge to be a assignment that is ironically the centerpiece of their existence. In added words, a lot of managers abhorrence cadre reviews, and abounding adjourn until the HR administering or the advisers "scream." Back no advisers can get a pay accession until they get a review, HR departments apparatus systems to automate and force the analysis action as a agency to abode this.

The aim of achievement administering systems is to both automate the agent analysis action and hotlink reviews to authoritative performance. The aim is to ascertain whether advisers are demography absolute achieve to achieve their bent achievement goals; whether there are assumption affairs in abode for top managers; what kinds of abilities the alignment will charge in the next few years; and so on. Those are the kinds of questions (and hopefully adapted answers) that achievement administering systems should put on the desktops of both managers and employees.

Performance administering systems generally cover or augment into advantage (sometimes aswell alleged agent allurement administering [EIM]) systems in adjustment to added accurately deliver merit-based pay increases. Afore deploying such a system, managers would commonly analysis advisers annually about their date of hiring, generally with the aftereffect that well-deserving advisers would not get the admission they adapted artlessly because the basin of accessible money had already been spent by the time they accustomed their reviews. Surprising or not, advantage represents added than 60 percent of absolute accumulated expenditures, yet a lot of All-around 2000 firms are still not appropriately advantageous their highest-performing workers. The aim is now to complete agent reviews at the end of the budgetary year, and aswell administer the arete amount account by reviewing all achievement array afore distributing the pay increases. Additionally, such systems are advantageous for accepting a twelve-month appearance of agent performance, against absorption too carefully on the aeon that anon precedes the review. The accepted "defeat the purpose of achievement review" acquaintance of abounding managers has been that the aggregation would set the ambit for pay raises and bacon ranges at "budget time," and again apprehend managers to adumbrate the allotment raises individuals would receive, so that the money would be in the account if time came to analysis the employee.

More absolute achievement administering systems nowadays cover a stronger hotlink to upstream business goals and objectives, as able-bodied as a tighter affiliation to rewards, including arete pay, concise capricious incentives such as account or agency awards, and longer-term incentives such as banal grants. Some vendors action succession-planning software that builds on achievement and training systems to assay acceptable candidates for jobs added up the aliment chain. Again, the aim is to about-face humans into a aggressive advantage and to ensure that there are programs that pay for achievement and accolade humans for accomplishing goals that move the action forward. These categorical capabilities should admonition users not alone appoint a higher-quality employee, but aswell bigger clue that employee's performance, and authorize a stronger hotlink amid the employee's achievement and compensation. Enterprises wish to be able to accession the bar for top performers while agreement low performers on a achievement advance plan.

One analogy could be at an accoutrement banker that generally fell abbreviate of expectations with the barrage of a new band of jeans, which prompted it to adjudge to analysis bazaar jeans fitters who had been accomplished through e-learning about the products, how to fit jeans on women, and how to accord the best advice. The activity purportedly alternate a 75 percent admission in revenue, back the fitters began accepting an allurement every time a brace of jeans was sold. There was a achievement administering band-aid in the accomplishments cogent them how they were accomplishing according to their goals, whereby learning, performance, and incentives were all angry calm in an chip way to drive accumulated acquirement and performance.

Performance and Compensation Management at the Core of Human Capital Management

Once a eyes certificate is made, it is bright that it has won over the arch management. But the success of any accomplishing lies absolutely with the

i) Cerebral aversion

to change Any change in the absolute arrangement provokes a cerebral acknowledgment in the apperception of abounding people: the arrangement they accept is good, so why change it? They scream, adage that they accept been alive with it back so abounding years; why do they charge to change and apprentice something new? This attrition to change is unavoidable. But as technology grows, it is basic to change accepted processes, machines, and software to save time and money.

The animal addiction by and ample is to argue change. This because of the fears and apropos of humans apropos the new system's abeyant account and appulse on their circadian life.

ii) Overcoming aversionmanaging humans It is acute to advertise the change, contrarily abettor assurance will be affected. The afterward account point to a few things that can be done to accomplish this. The best way to do this is to adapt aggregation affairs on the charge for change, and ask the advisers to appear up with solutions. This ability absorb acclimation brainstorming sessions and discussions to analyze the achievability of accomplishing allowances after advance in change. If it is not possible, advisers themselves may feel the charge for a new system. Any band-aid that evolves will absolutely account the organization. Again they will abet in evaluating accepted and new systems: they will be accessible to change, and will be agog to apprentice how to advance their way of accomplishing things.

Those who do accept antecedent ability in accomplishing of PLM systems can conduct sessions on how their circadian accepted plan can be done efficiently, and can altercate how it can advice them alone (as able-bodied as the accomplished organization). It should be antiseptic that there will not be any blackmail to job security; rather, bigger achievement of systems will accommodate a addition to administration to acquaint new productsand appropriately assuredly accession application levels by streamlining accepted processes.

This is a aggressive world, and there are hundreds of PLM software vendors. One needs to appraise them in adjustment to accept the appropriate one for the organization. We took allotment in PLM implementations in the automotive, hi-tech, and aliment industries. We accept aggregate the inputs of these experiences, and aloft belief the assorted agency of software alternative pertaining to PLM, we abridge the afterward action for bell-ringer selection.

i) PLM arrangement certificate preparation

An action has to adapt a certificate on how they anticipate their PLM system: this is their company's "PLM arrangement document."

First of all, let all the stakeholders of the proposed PLM arrangement brainstorm (with the account that acquired in change administration sessions, as declared above) how they anticipate a arrangement that would advice them plan efficiently. All inputs aggregate actuality charge to be documented.

Let us accord a brace of examples. Some engineers ability appear up with the abstraction of accessing designs from home, an internet cafпїЅ, or even for that amount from addition country. From this concept, we ability get the abstraction of a PLM arrangement getting web-based. Some humans ability appear up with the abstraction that PLM systems should accommodate an advantage to see what will be the amount if new apparatus are added by removing old components, and carnality versa. What this agency is that the PLM arrangement may charge to accommodate a "what-if" affectionate of amount analysis. Thus, aloft brainstorming, the a lot of important appearance (agreed by majority) charge to be gathered, and accurate in the name of the PLM arrangement document. This completes the document, and is an able committee's baseline for evaluating assorted software vendors.

ii) Software evaluation

The software artefact appraisal methods appropriate by Ireland's Centre for Software Engineering (http://www.cse.dcu.ie) can be calmly used. They are based on all-embracing standards such as ISO/IEC 9126 and the proposed ISO/IEC 14598 (see http://www.cse.dcu.ie/essiscope/sm4/14598-5.html) for evaluating a software system. Our appraisal admission is based on this baseline, and is discussed below.

The industry convenance is to anatomy a board or accumulation of humans who accept acceptable acquaintance on application PLM software, anatomic experts in the breadth of implementation, abstruse experts, and experts from the corresponding design, manufacturing, production, and accretion departments.

Once a board is formed, it needs to acquaintance software vendors by all accessible means, such as agreeable tenders, contacting vendors' business departments, and so on. This will ensure the absorption of assorted vendors. Once this board starts accepting responses, again it should allotment its eyes and PLM arrangement certificate with those vendors, and specify bread-and-butter limits. This reduces abundant of the affliction in aggravating to accomplish a abbreviate account a part of the abounding vendors who do not accept what an action is searching for: alone those vendors with offerings analogous the expectations (at atomic nearly) will approach. Finally, there will be bound set of vendors which can action a band-aid as per needs.

Once there is a account of short-listed vendors, affairs with the bell-ringer business departments should yield place. However, an alignment should not annoyed with the archetypal demos. Instead, they charge to assert on getting apparent the appearance in applied contexts, with at atomic baby quantities of bequest data. At this stage, advice apropos the integrations that bell-ringer software supports needs to be obtained. This is to ensure that systems currently in use (like action ability planning [ERP] or computer-assisted architecture [CAD] systems) can be chip with the new PLM System

At the point area an action has completed the account of PLM appearance it's searching for (in the anatomy of a PLM arrangement document), a agenda can be able for -to-be vendors. This can be managed by defining a weight for anniversary of the features. Based on this (and the appearance accurate by anniversary bell-ringer software), accomplish a scorecard. This will accord a score-based appearance of anniversary vendor's capability. This abstracts can again be analyzed application bar graphs, pie charts, 2-D graphs, and so forth. Even a simple allegory of absolute array in the anatomy a agenda table will aswell advice to adjudge who is better. Table 1 shows a archetypal scorecard.

An Overview of Product Lifecycle Management Implementation Challenges

According to CIMdata (www.cimdata.com/PLM/plm.html), artefact lifecycle administration (PLM) can be authentic as "a cardinal business admission that applies a constant set of business solutions in abutment of the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of artefact analogue advice beyond the continued action from abstraction to end of lifeintegrating people, processes, business systems, and information."

Part One of the alternation An Overview of Artefact Lifecycle Administration Accomplishing Challenges.

Wikipedia defines PLM as follows:

"Product Lifecycle Administration describes the action of managing the absolute lifecycle of a artefact from the abstraction and architecture phase, artefact assay (finite aspect analysis) through assembly planning, decision and business to the end of activity of a product." (www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Lifecycle_Management [accessed March 2006])

Thus, we accomplish that PLM systems abutment the administration of a portfolio of products, processes, and services, from antecedent concept, through design, launch, production, and use, to final disposal.

The Charge for PLM

As CIMdata's admiral Ed Miller accurately emphasizes, "PLM supports innovation-oriented initiatives such as chip artefact development, architecture collaboration, bookish accumulation alternation management, and all-around ability utilization." PLM applications authority the affiance of seamlessly abounding all of the advice produced throughout all phases of a product's activity aeon to anybody in an organization, alternating with key suppliers and customers.

For example, an automotive aggregation can abate the time it takes to acquaint new models in a amount of ways. Artefact engineers can badly abbreviate the aeon of implementing and acknowledging engineering changes beyond an continued and globally broadcast architecture alternation (covering suppliers, customers, and arch accomplishment and arch architecture engineers) which can admission all abstracts through a web-based PLM system. Accretion capacity can plan added finer with suppliers to reclaim parts. Thus, the artefact can be bogus faster, paving the way for capturing the bazaar beforehand than the competition.

Implementation Challenges

When we move from one arrangement to addition system, it is to advance the process, and save money and time. However, it is acute that we afflicted assertive challenges whenever we do this. We can broadly assort the PLM accomplishing challenges as follows:

1. Preparation of the eyes document

2. Gathering abettor abutment for change

3. Software appraisal and selection

4. Accomplishing management

5. Mapping of accepted action to the appearance of the called software system

6. Identifying customizations and prioritization

7. Bequest abstracts loading into the anew congenital PLM system

8. Abstruse training on PLM software for maintenance

9. Hands-on user training on acceptance of new system.

10. Kickoff of new PLM system

Any aloft change in the way an alignment plan needs to be guided with a vision. The arch advice admiral (CIOs) who drive the accomplishing of systems such as PLM should accept a bright eyes and roadmap of what is to be done, and what they wish to accomplish with it.

The CIO's antecedent role with PLM is that of change agent, through alive with engineering to advertise the business case to arch management. From there, they charge to baby-sit a cross-functional PLM activity aggregation answerable with mapping and defining accepted business processes. With the engineering and operations groups as co-sponsors, they charge to barrage a attack to advertise the allowances of PLM to the company's altered constituencies. Once an acceding is reached, this needs to be documented, and it will drive the absolute implementation.

Thus, the achievement at this date is a PLM accomplishing eyes certificate acutely anecdotic the key milestones, accomplishing methodology, assorted phases, and checkpoints. Finally, it explains the allowances that are accepted in the abbreviate and the continued run. Apart from this, it should announce if to apprehend acknowledgment on investment (ROI).

Product Lifecycle Management Challenges: From Solution Evaluation to Kickoff

In the aboriginal allotment of this series, we explored some of the difficulties inherent in selecting a artefact lifecycle administration (PLM) system, including the accepted cerebral attrition to change, as able-bodied as means of managing and advancing for this change. One of the arch weapons in the armory of change administration angry out to be the PLM arrangement document, which outlines the company's eyes for the PLM system. We about-face now to the specifics of the absolute implementation, including accomplishing management, prioritization of customization needs, and alpha of the new system.

Part Two of the alternation An Overview of Artefact Lifecycle Administration Accomplishing Challenges.

Implementation Management

Once a bell-ringer is selected, the aggregation should accede how to administer the absolute implementation. The afterward gives some abstraction of how to administer this important issue.

i) Ambit of plan and establishing a council committee

Sign a ambit of plan (SOW) certificate with the bell-ringer which describes all the items that are to be covered during accomplishing of the PLM System. Accommodate the PLM arrangement document, and all added advice to the accomplished vendor. Involve arch associates of the alignment in advancing the SOW document. Define the ambit with alternate understanding.

Establish a council lath with consultants from the bell-ringer aggregation and arch associates of the alignment (as able-bodied as with stakeholders of the new PLM system). Formulate the action for implementation, and book out a milestone-driven plan. The SOW certificate needs to acutely announce milestones which announce some arresting achievement, and which will aswell angle as transaction gates (meaning that payments to the bell-ringer should be affiliated with these milestones). The council lath should accommodated at approved intervals to boldness any issues, and its decisions should be final.

ii) Basement and installations

Once the SOW is prepared, the accomplishing will be kicked off. The council lath contains a assertive set of humans who will beforehand assorted teams which will accomplish assertive responsibilities. The assorted functionalities are the basement group, the accomplishing group, and the superior group.

The basement accumulation will aggregation up with assorted sections of the action to annex the appropriate basement (such as the server machine, applicant machine, and book servers), and to analyze and annex assets which can plan on the accomplishing internally. If charge be, they admit the appliance with the amenable animal assets (HR) department, and anatomy assorted teams.

The accomplishing accumulation will be led by arch anatomic and abstruse managers who will drive the accomplishing by alignment the training appropriate for the assets articular by the basement group. It will aswell anatomy a activity plan for implementation.

The superior accumulation will accommodate a awful accomplished superior head, with a aggregation which is accomplished in ensuring the software superior of new systems. They will abetment the development through appropriate testing and by implementing the industry-accepted procedures to bear superior systems.

Once the new arrangement is installed, the next footfall is to accomplish a gap assay and adapt a mapping document.

i) Gap assay and mapping certificate preparation

Any software will accept acceptable features. Afterwards all, that's what afflicted in the aboriginal abode and led to the accommodation to buy it. But accumulate in apperception that it is absurd to get aggregate out of the box. There should be accurate abstraction to accept the new system, its benefits, and the accomplishing procedure.

Since a PLM arrangement certificate is already available, there is bright description of what is accepted of the new arrangement and what the accepted action is. Map the solutions accessible in the new arrangement to the requirements. There should be mapping adjoin anniversary feature, and absolutely declared if a affection is non-available. If a affection is accessible through a altered process, this aswell charge to explained. This will accession questions of whether this altered action is best convenance in the industry, and aswell of the authoritative allowances should this new action be followed.

However, if a claim is so important to the alignment that it cannot be ignored, it should be explained why accommodation is viable, and the accomplishment appropriate to apparatus the accommodation needs to be assessed, if possible.

Identifying Customizations and Assigning Priority

Once the mapping certificate is prepared, it will pave the way for anecdotic what appearance are not accessible in the system, and it will aswell allegorize the akin of complication complex in affair these requirements. This mapping certificate will be presented to the council committee. This lath will altercate and access at the account of customizations, ranked by priority.

i) Anecdotic customizations

The council lath will accept the mapping certificate accurate through the ascribe of the corresponding teams. These teams should explain the call of requirements if they are not available, and the achievability of alteration any action as per the architecture provided in the new PLM system, to abstain customization. It is consistently bigger to abstain customizing new systems too abundant because it leads to loopholes, and the cohesiveness of the arrangement will be reduced. There can aswell be accompanying problems if there is an upgrade, or if the bell-ringer releases new versions with added features. Thus, alone the a lot of appropriate appearance defective in the new PLM arrangement will be articular for customization.

ii) Assigning priority

Careful appraisal will absolute customization. However, afore a accommodation is taken about customizing for some feature, its accent and criticality charge to be evaluated. Some features, admitting important, may not be appropriate immediately. An action should analyze the actual requirements that ability be show-stoppers for a new PLM arrangement implementation. Those requirements which are beneath important can be implemented at a afterwards stage. It is consistently bigger to accord baronial to these customizations, and to accredit an end date for accomplishing for anniversary of these items.

Once the action of implementing the new software arrangement is in place, it is consistently bigger to access abstruse training for the assets aural the organization, to abstain over-reliance on the vendor. Usually, this will be allotment of the acquirement agreement. This will beforehand the organization's adequacy to break abounding baby issues that ability appear afterwards implementation.

A Simplified Approach to Powerful, Flexible Data Visualization

Data visualization tools allow organizations to integrate various best-of-breed offerings to create customized business intelligence (BI), performance management, and analytics-based solutions. For organizations that cannot afford enterprise BI solutions, or that require a subset of functionality, data visualization allows them to use specific analytics on the back-end, and to couple it with customized scorecards, dashboards, heat graphs, etc. to present statistical and performance-based data visually. This visual data representation, if used properly, ties back to an organization's strategic initiatives through the use of metrics and other performance-based indicators to drive corporate performance.

Corda Technologies Inc., a Lindon, Utah (US)-based company, provides organizations with a simplified approach to dashboard design, and an easy way to develop front-end dashboards that link to source data. Corda's specialty in data visualization and performance dashboards evolved from the vendor's strength in providing software and developer tools used to build information portals. Capitalizing on its niche expertise, Corda developed CenterView, the company's enterprise dashboard product. Corda's additional offerings include data integration capabilities to link back-end, third-party offerings and Corda's front-end solutions.

Software Components

CenterView 2.0 executive dashboard leverages data from BI, enterprise resource planning (ERP), spreadsheets, and operational applications, and present that data in the form of executive dashboards and balanced scorecards to help organizations manage overall organizational performance initiatives. Key features of CenterView 2.0 include the ability to customize the design and layout of dashboards, the ability to define how key performance indicators (KPIs) and dashboards are presented in print, and a gallery tool that allows users to save and share their designs.

Corda's combination of dashboarding, data integration, and developer tools allows organizations to link back-end, analytic data to its dashboards without the need for third-party support. CenterView 2.0 is the executive dashboard and data visualization tool that works as the data presentation layer. Additionally, data integration capabilities leverage organizational data from multiple sources to feed data into CenterView so that organizations can use one product to develop their dashboards, instead of leveraging various vendors for data integration, management, etc. Finally, using development tools to design and build dashboards, scorecards, and other business-specific, custom visualizations within a server-based environment empowers users to grow their dashboard environments internally, to manage that process in the long term, and to control the data integration process.

Corda's data integration tool eliminates an organization's need for a third-party tool when implementing Corda's product offerings. Many data visualization vendors focus on front-end visualization tools to build dashboards and scorecards for its customers, whereas Corda takes its offerings one step further and coordinates the data capturing and consolidation as well. Included in CenterView 2.0 are data cleansing, mapping, and consolidation features to pool data from across the organization to feed information to CenterView.

Developer tools include the following:

* CORDA PopChart—a server-based graphing product that can generate charts and graphs for any high-demand, Web-based application.

* CORDA OptiMap—a server-based mapping solution that presents data in a dynamic, geographical format for display on any Web browser.

* CORDA Highwire—a tool that delivers high-speed, server-based hypertext markup language (HTML)-to-PDF conversion for high-quality document creation and print output.

* CORDA CenterView Builder—a graphical design tool used to build complete interfaces for Corda's CenterView 2.0.

* CORDA Tools Builder—a graphical design tool used by developers to customize the look and feel of charts, graphs, and maps.

Product Strengths

Corda's core strengths are its products' ease of use and quick build and deployment times, and the service and support customers receive from the company, which all help to set this vendor apart from its competition. Additionally, the company's partner strategy offers software vendors the ability to integrate data visualization tools into their own products so that users have a single, integrated solution.

Corda's dashboards are easy to use. Unlike other BI-related products that require detailed user training, Corda's dashboards can be deployed throughout the organization without a concern for in-depth training due to the way users see the data. For example, data values become viewable as a user moves a mouse over the item he or she is interested in viewing. This allows users to drill through in order to complete additional analyses, or gives users an overview of multiple data sets without the need to view several screens.

Corda's partner strategy directly affects its solutions' implementation times. Because Corda's solutions can be integrated as front-end tools with those of their partner analytics vendors, organizations that implement dashboards as extensions of analytics vendors' products can implement dashboards in weeks, as opposed to months. Furthermore, organizations do not have to be concerned with integration at their end, since platform issues have already been dealt with at the vendor level. This is advantageous to organizations, because often implementations take longer than anticipated due to problems with integration. Additionally, organizations can take advantage of best-of-breed vendors and their key benefits and differentiators while still presenting a strong user interface. This can be readily seen by Corda's partnerships with data mining and predictive analytics vendors, giving users the ability to capitalize on both vendors' strengths within a single platform.

Product Challenges

Corda's key challenge stems from being a new entry in the data visualization market. Being a young company suggests it has areas that require growth in order to successfully compete in the market and to ensure long-term viability. In addition, future product and company viability, and user customization are areas of growth Corda needs to focus on.

Based on Corda's newness in the market, corporate viability is an issue. In an industry such as BI, certain vendors have emerged as market leaders, creating a difficult market for any new vendor to penetrate successfully. Corda's partnerships with analytics and data mining vendors give the company an advantage by merging its product with various vendor offerings. However, most of these partners integrate Corda's solutions into their own product offerings, creating a seamless integration without any name recognition for Corda. This means that although Corda's partner strategy works, it has a negative side in that the company's recognition has not extended as far as it could. What this comes down to is that many organizations could be using Corda products without knowing it. Instead of expanding its installed base, Corda may have to rely on the expansion of back-end products to fuel its sales strategy.

As long as Corda's partner strategy stays strong, its current users will not have to worry about this issue. Future customers should evaluate the company's current product offerings and compare them to other, more mature data visualization vendors to make sure Corda provides the appropriate features required. Otherwise, users may have to wait for the organization to grow in order to take advantage of new features and functionality needed to stay competitive within the market.

Corda's current development tools allow customers to develop dashboards. However, enhanced features should be transferred to the user community to allow for independent dashboard development within different business units. This includes the current software functionality for users not using the development tool when building their own dashboards, as well as the documentation available to the users themselves. Users should be able to enhance and change the features used and data analyzed based on changing needs within the organization. As an organization's environment matures, users' requirements grow and change. The ability to customize dashboards at the user level allows users to integrate dashboard use into their business processes, and to tailor their dashboard designs to changing departmental needs.

Therefore, the sixth to the eleventh criteria for selecting a software estimation tool are

* the tool must provide for scheduling the project
* the schedule must be derived from the estimated effort
* the tool must automate schedule generation to the extent feasible
* the tool must allow for human intervention when creating the schedule
* the generated schedule must have adequate detail and must be exportable to a familiar intermediate program such as MS-Excel
* the tool must be based on estimated PD, but allow for scheduled PD to be different from the estimated PD

This eleventh criterion is so because when we honestly estimate the effort in PD and then schedule it, the scheduled PD overshoots the estimated PD due to loss of time in personnel allocation, fragmentation of work, idle time, and start-to-finish relationships.

Estimation for Part Life Cycle Projects

Significant projects, such as software maintenance, enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, and testing projects, are not full software development life cycle (SDLC) projects. The software estimation tool has to cater to these projects too, using such techniques as task-based estimation. Task-based estimation is parameterized so that different project types can be defined and used by the organization.

Therefore, the twelfth criterion for selecting a software estimation tool is

All software should be built with users in mind. An expert can work with any tool, but the main distinguishing characteristic of a good software estimation tool is that it can produce an expert-quality output even from a person of average expertise. This distinction can be achieved by building a tool with an intuitive interface that keeps the need for training on how to use the tool to a minimum. This is possible with the availability of GUI tools. It is also possible to use the wrong controls, which places a strain on the user instead of making usage of the tool easier. Oftentimes, software tools are developed with a focus on making the user interfaces more appealing rather than on being functional, making the tool more complex to use. The tool must be geared more toward functionality and usability than to jazziness. A simple user interface (UI) is always the better UI.

Therefore, the thirteenth criterion for selecting a software estimation tool is

* the tool must be built with usability in mind, and with an intuitive interface that makes it easier for a person with average skills to quickly master the tool

Usage of Popular Software Sizing Techniques

Software estimation is perhaps as old as software development itself. Some estimation techniques have become popular and are used by many organizations. Especially common are the LOC, function point analysis (FPA), and UCP techniques. Two other widely used techniques are object points and feature points.

Therefore, the fourteenth criterion for selecting a software estimation tool is

* the tool must provide for as many commonly used software estimation techniques possible

Auditability

"Two heads are better than one" is a well-known dictum, and it forms the basis of software inspections, reviews, and walkthroughs. Therefore, it is unnecessary to say that the estimate made by one person, however diligent and expert that person may be, needs to be reviewed by one more peer. The software estimation tool must provide for making a detailed estimate so that this estimate can be reviewed and improved upon. This detailed estimate also assists in reconciling with actual effort spent on the project in order to draw lessons from the experience, and improve the process of estimation in subsequent projects.

Therefore, the fifteenth criterion for selecting a software estimation tool is

* The tool must provide for making estimates that are auditable

Reporting Capability

The result obtained by estimating is to be submitted to the client, management, or user. These reports should not include the unnecessary details, but present only the details that are required.

Therefore, the sixteenth criterion for selecting a software estimation tool is

* the tool should generate a summary report and a detailed report for every estimate made, as well as a summary report of all estimation's made on the tool

Estimator Productivity

It is extremely important to keep in mind the pressure that the estimators, who are usually either project leaders or project managers, are under. The software estimation tool must facilitate picking data from a predefined list as much as possible so that estimators are not required to type the data inputs into the tool. It is also likely that projects in an organization are similar in nature, though certainly not identical. Therefore, the tool must also enable the ability to copy an existing estimate and to modify it to generate a new estimate. This saves a great deal of the estimator's time and therefore money for the organization.

Therefore, the final two criteria (seventeenth and eighteenth) for selecting a software estimation tool are

* the tool must provide for selection from a list of choices as much as possible
* the tool must allow the "copy, modify, and generate" process for a new estimate

Software development outsourcing has now become commonplace. So, it has become necessary for the outsourcer and the provider to reach an agreement about the size, development effort, cost, and development schedule of the software product being outsourced. This has caused software estimation to move from hunch-based estimation to the use of mature, research-backed estimation techniques. The process of estimation has also moved from manual estimation using spreadsheets to tools.

The stakes in software estimation are high. Underestimation may cause the project to be unprofitable for the vendor; overestimation may cause the project to be lost to the competition. Similarly, the outsourcer may end up paying more if software is overestimated; if underestimated, the outsourcer's budget may be overshot. While software estimation is still a creative endeavor, tools help relieve the mundane aspects of it and allow the estimator to concentrate on the creative aspects of estimation.

Software estimation includes the following four aspects: software size, software cost, software effort, and software delivery schedule.

A plethora of software estimation tools are available to choose from in the market, and it is often difficult to arrive at an educated decision on which tool to purchase. As usual, vendors always claim that their tools are better than the competition's in that they are the most scientific and suited to any type of software project or organization.

This article outlines eighteen criteria for selecting the right software estimation tool, and attempts to educate professionals so that they can make informed choices when buying a software estimation tool.

Units of Measure for Software Size

It is a known fact that there are multiple measures of software size, namely, lines of code (LOC), function points, use case points (UCP), feature points, and so on. And each of these sizing measures has a sizable following. As a result, there is no agreement among information technology (IT) professionals on what the best unit of measure for software size is. There are many reasons for this.

The programming platforms of these measures differ widely—mainframes, midrange, personal computers (PCs), networked applications, and finally, Internet-based software applications. The development platforms range from common business-oriented language (COBOL) to graphical user interface (GUI) tools to Internet programming languages. The application architectures have moved from one tier to multi-tiered applications.

There is a difference of opinion on what constitutes an LOC. Variable declaration, comments, and length of an LOC bear different connotations to different perspectives. A vendor would like to count all, but a buyer would not.

GUI programming, in which a significant code is predeveloped, adds one more dimension to the debate on LOC. This type of programming has moved away from procedure-oriented programming toward event-oriented programming. Now GUI controls are added to LOC, and there is confusion on how to measure the size of GUI.

Several projects, such as those involving software maintenance and testing, are not full development life cycle projects, and there is confusion on how to measure the size of these.

Therefore, criterion number one for selecting a software estimation tool is

* the tool must allow multiple units of measure for software size

In other words, the tool must allow the user to carry out software estimation using multiple, commonly used software size measures.

Common Unit of Measure for Software Size

Now the question becomes—if the size measurement is carried out using different software size measures, how does the organization measure its productivity and capacity? Measurement of an organization's software development productivity is possible only when the software size is measured using one unit of measure.

Therefore, the second criterion for selecting a software estimation tool is

* the tool must enable conversion of multiple units of measure into one unit of measure for the software size to become a standard in the organization

There are no differences in opinion among IT professionals when talking about software costing. Everyone agrees that software costing must be measured in the currency of the country, be it dollars, euros, rupees, etc. While software development effort in person days (PD) is the major cost source, other cost items come into play while estimating the cost of software to be developed. It is likely that the additional cost items vary from organization to organization in terms of variety and unit cost. So, the tool must allow for parameterization and maintenance of cost items (that is, adding, modifying, and deleting of data for cost items). It is also likely that PD costs vary from project to project as well.

Therefore, the third, fourth, and fifth criteria for selecting a software estimation tool are

* the tool must allow software cost estimation
* the tool must provide for parameterization of PD cost
* the tool must provide for maintenance of cost items

Scheduling the Software Project

Effort is estimated for three reasons: (1) to commit to a delivery schedule with the client, management, or users; (2) to estimate the resources required to execute the project; and (3) to estimate the cost of the project to allow for accurate funds allocation or pricing, with the objective of cost and profit optimization.

We have already enumerated that the software estimation tool caters to reasons number 2 and 3 above. While so, developing a schedule for delivery commitment to stakeholders (the first reason) is by no means an insignificant one. Scheduling is a creative task and an activity that calls for human ingenuity; it cannot be fully automated. Equally important is the fact that there is no accepted or standard way of apportioning a percentage of project effort to a given phase or activity.

The advantages of deriving a schedule from estimate ought to be (1) that the schedule is efficient; (2) that the schedule caters to allocation of resources and can be adjusted accordingly; (3) that the schedule allows for allocating effort in PD to different phases; and (4) that the schedule is sufficiently detailed and exportable to an intermediate file from which it can be taken into a full-fledged program evaluation and review technique/critical path method (PERT/CPM) package like MS-Project and Primavera.

Performance and Compensation Management at the Core of Human Capital Management

While decades have been spent investing in automation technologies for better use of tangible assets, only recently have enterprises begun to invest in optimizing human capital. Tactical and administrative human resources (HR) management is morphing into strategic human capital management (HCM).

Part Three of the series Thou Shalt Manage Human Capital Better.

Some might argue that HCM revolves around better performance management and employee compensation. As the economy continues to rebound and talent wars intensify, companies have been increasingly leveraging traditionally elusive "pay-for-performance" technologies that successfully automate and link compensation planning with business and employee performance. Practically every organization regularly reviews the performance of its employees, which most managers confess to be a chore that is ironically the centerpiece of their existence. In other words, most managers hate personnel reviews, and many procrastinate until the HR department or the employees "scream." Since no employees can get a pay raise until they get a review, HR departments implement systems to automate and force the review process as a means to address this.

The aim of performance management systems is to both automate the employee review process and link reviews to organizational performance. The aim is to ascertain whether employees are taking definitive steps to achieve their determined performance goals; whether there are succession plans in place for top managers; what kinds of skills the organization will need in the next few years; and so on. Those are the kinds of questions (and hopefully appropriate answers) that performance management systems should put on the desktops of both managers and employees.

Performance management systems often include or feed into compensation (sometimes also called employee incentive management [EIM]) systems in order to more justly distribute merit-based pay increases. Before deploying such a system, managers would customarily review employees annually around their date of hiring, often with the result that well-deserving employees would not get the increase they deserved simply because the pool of available money had already been spent by the time they received their reviews. Surprising or not, compensation represents more than 60 percent of total corporate expenditures, yet most Global 2000 firms are still not properly rewarding their highest-performing workers. The aim is now to complete employee reviews at the end of the fiscal year, and also manage the merit expense budget by reviewing all performance scores before distributing the pay increases. Additionally, such systems are useful for obtaining a twelve-month view of employee performance, versus focusing too closely on the period that immediately precedes the review. The customary "defeat the purpose of performance review" experience of many managers has been that the company would set the parameters for pay raises and salary ranges at "budget time," and then expect managers to predict the percentage raises individuals would receive, so that the money would be in the budget when time came to review the employee.

More comprehensive performance management systems nowadays include a stronger link to upstream business goals and objectives, as well as a tighter connection to rewards, including merit pay, short-term variable incentives such as bonus or commission awards, and longer-term incentives such as stock grants. Some vendors offer succession-planning software that builds on performance and training systems to identify likely candidates for jobs further up the food chain. Again, the aim is to turn people into a competitive advantage and to ensure that there are programs that pay for performance and reward people for achieving goals that move the enterprise forward. These outlined capabilities should help users not only hire a higher-quality employee, but also better track that employee's performance, and establish a stronger link between the employee's performance and compensation. Enterprises want to be able to raise the bar for high performers while placing low performers on a performance improvement plan.

One illustration could be at an apparel retailer that often fell short of expectations with the launch of a new line of jeans, which prompted it to decide to test market jeans fitters who had been trained through e-learning about the products, how to fit jeans on women, and how to give the best advice. The project purportedly returned a 75 percent increase in revenue, since the fitters began receiving an incentive every time a pair of jeans was sold. There was a performance management solution in the background telling them how they were doing according to their goals, whereby learning, performance, and incentives were all tied together in an integrated way to drive corporate revenue and performance.

Leading vendors in this space include Authoria (which recently acquired Advanced Information Management [AIM], a provider of compensation management), SuccessFactors, Halogen Software, Workscape (including recently acquired Performaworks), FirstDoor.com, Callidus Software, Centive, Ceridian, HRsmart, Kadiri, ProAlt Technologies (now both part of Workstream Software), Softscape, Kenexa, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) giants SAP, Oracle, and Lawson Software.

In July, Lawson announced the acquisition of Competency Assessment Solutions (CAS), a provider of performance management solutions for the health care industry to comply with reporting standards set by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO). Compensation management aligned with individual performance management creates a true pay-for-performance environment, and leaders in this realm are tying the workforce to organizational goals and productivity, such as revenue per full-time equivalent employee (FTE). Developing competency models for each work position can be time-consuming and costly, but once conducted, these models can be leveraged across the entire HCM realm to improve the quality of new hires, compel desired employee performance, facilitate employee development, and assist in the development of succession plans. In other words, the entire employee life cycle (acquiring, developing, managing, and measuring performance) can be facilitated.

To recap, HCM has evolved beyond the simple automation of business tasks to the more complex streamlining of traditional HR processes and increasing of efficiencies in the broad management of human capital. Strategic HCM solutions can help organizations transform their people into a competitive advantage by aligning managers and employees with corporate goals of driving business value. Authoria reportedly recently spoke to more than 200 senior HR executives and asked them about their top "pain points." Leading this list was aligning employee goals and corporate goals, paying for performance, and developing top talent. Trying to accomplish these important objectives in a pedestrian way has proven to be equal to finding the fountain of youth or the holy grail. Conversely, well-devised HCM strategies and methods should help execute these priorities and make these initiatives successful.

Moreover, Genesys recently released the results of its HCM trends survey. The vendor's web-based suite PeopleComeFirst streamlines HR, benefit administration and payments, payroll processing, self-service, competency-based learning management, performance management, recruitment, and time and attendance (T&A), and it can be implemented as either human resources outsourcing (HRO) services or as licensed software. According to respondents of the survey, the top HCM priorities for 2006 included talent and leadership development, combined with talent acquisition and retention (45 percent), performance management (21 percent), and streamlining processes (18 percent). In addition, 18 percent of respondents also indicated that aligning people and business goals would be an important priority in the coming year, which shows that the attention of HR departments is increasingly centered upon becoming process experts and improving business processes, focusing on talent acquisitions and subsequent management, and providing better data for decision making. Moreover, 38 percent of respondents indicated that budget expectations over the next 12 months for HR technology and outsourced solutions would increase, by as much as 9 percent in some cases, thereby enabling funding of the services and tools required to support these top priorities.

Each year, the CedarCrestone HCM survey also provides the latest data on workforce technologies and service delivery approaches worldwide. The early-2006 survey found that there is now a statistical and causal relationship among key HCM applications and operating income growth. Those four applications are workforce planning, competency management, learning management, and an HR-oriented help desk (call center). However, succession planning shows opportunities for improvement, and this is the area that users cite they would like more help on from IT solutions. Logically, the processes and people that are seen as part of strategic core competencies and competitive differentiators are retained in-house. Conversely, non-core and non-strategic services like payroll, US 401(k), pensions, and benefits administrations are frequently outsourced, as well as hardware technology components.

Consequently, there are many indications that strategic HCM applications have moved to the forefront of enterprise application priorities, replacing the prior focus on core transactional systems and employee self-service. Waking up to the realization that their workforce is one of the most critical, yet perhaps one of the most unexploited sources of competitive advantage, and the recognition of the need to align business and individual performance goals (along with better tools to accomplish this) has been driving HCM investments in many companies.

Thus, one can define three families of HCM solutions providers:

Thus, one can define three families of HCM solutions providers:

1. traditional ERP vendors like SAP, Oracle, Lawson, Microsoft Dynamics, Agresso, Sage, Deltek, etc.;

2. former best-of-breed niche human resource management systems (HRMS) vendors that are evolving into best-of-breed HCM suite providers, such as Hewitt Associates (including its recent acquisition Cyborg), Ultimate Software, Employease (recently acquired by its long-term partner, ADP), Extensity (formerly Geac HR, now part of Infor), Kronos, Meta4, Taleo, BrasRing, Czanne Software, Genesys, Workstream, and including traditional payroll or HR service providers like ADP and Ceridian, which have also encroached on the realm of HCM lately; and

3. the plethora of niche HCM providers (most of which have been mentioned earlier) in areas like performance and compensation or incentive management, e-learning, employee development, competency modeling, succession planning, workforce scheduling and optimization, and so on.

What may work in favor of the best-of-breed applications is their complementary nature to an installed enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and increasing ease in integrating these and orchestrating processes via service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services developments (see Understanding SOA, Web Services, BPM, BPEL, and More).

Some industry data and first-hand observations indicate that many enterprises which have deployed an HRMS system from one of the leading ERP providers might gain better results and increasingly deeper functionality by working with a best-of-breed provider, such as those for core workforce management functions like compensation planning or employee performance management. This is largely because many best-of-breed HCM vendors excel at delivering tools that are configurable to support a customer's existing business process, and that are highly intuitive and easy to use, ensuring high rates of adoption by the most important user communities: employees and managers. Additionally, the proliferation of merger and acquisition activity in the HR vendor community is helping best-of-breed suite providers gain additional functionality fairly quickly, a trend that makes them even more formidable competitors to the large enterprise vendors.

Yet although pure-play vendors can sometimes provide more robust functionality, where they typically lack is in the integration with core HR employee data and back-office financial applications. ERP vendors tout the inherent strength of their comprehensive integration across the organization. For example, if a customer runs Oracle Financials and then implements the Oracle HRMS and Oracle CRM (customer relationship management) applications, it should get the added benefits of seamless integration and lower maintenance costs, and less downtime any time the company upgrades the software or installs dot-release enhancements. But if the customer chooses the cobbled approach and runs Oracle Financials along with Taleo, SumTotal, Callidus, ADP, Authoria, etc, one can imagine the inefficiencies, downtime, and strain on the information technology (IT) department created by the need to continuously make sure that all versions of the diverse niche software applications are integrated with the back-office financials applications.

While ERP vendors will continue to move toward one-stop shopping, thereby adding a wide variety of applications to their suites, best-of-breed HCM providers will gain strength through consolidation and by focusing on meeting specialized client needs in certain industries. For that reason, the likes of Authoria, Workscape, and Kenexa have lately promoted themselves into broader HCM suite providers from mere niche players.

The overall HR and HCM category is also experiencing a continuation of a shift to a subscription model, which is already well established in some segments, and often suitable for companies with variability in demand (see Software as a Service Is Gaining Ground. Some providers, like Ultimate Software, have lately reinvented their license businesses, and achieved stellar financial performance owing to the subscription-based model.

The Human Capital Management Market—Hot, but also Overpopulated

Tactical and administrative human resources (HR) management is morphing into strategic human capital management (HCR). In the US, we live in a litigation-happy society that makes any company more likely to be sued by an employee than to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). US regulatory requirements and corporate governance issues thus certainly vouch for the modestly increased demand for transactional HR systems that provide tools to produce (for instance) W-2 and 1099-R forms, the maintenance of data in compliance with immigration laws, and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) disability information. Also, there will be an ongoing need for support for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA), the Occupational Health & Safety Administration (OSHA), and Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance. Another key driver, especially in large companies, is the need to consolidate multiple HR transactional systems for efficiency and global workforce visibility.

Part Four of the series Thou Shalt Manage Human Capital Better.

Still, enterprises will likely invest less in integrated complex suites, as a result of their customarily high upfront cost, lengthy implementation, and hard-to-achieve return on investment (ROI). Instead, many are now looking at hosted service models where companies pay per-employee-per-month fees, bear no responsibility for hardware and software upgrades, and have complete control over their own talent management processes. Additionally, they might want to invest in point solutions that target line of business (LOB) users, and that provide proven, short-term payback in the form of direct cost reduction, process improvement, and increased user satisfaction.

Certainly, the latest technology advancements have also been a catalyst for a transformation in the way HR services are delivered to and adopted by employees and managers, allowing HR administrators to trade the largely transactional and administrative work they have been burdened with in the past, for more time to work on critical business-facing initiatives. To that end, a raft of best-of-breed solutions have automated HR workflows, reduced costs, and improved data quality.

Many software tools and applications have recently been designed to align and heighten employee and corporate performance, making the emerging human capital management (HCM) software category (sometimes also called workforce productivity or workforce optimization) especially fertile and crowded. Vendors abound, from as many directions as there are HCM subcategories. Many more vendors try to cover most of the bases with broader product suites that address "employee life cycle management" in its entirety. However, while there have been noticeable consolidation moves, which vendors will dominate the space in the long run cannot be exactly stated at this time.

Even long before being acquired by Oracle, former HCM leader PeopleSoft had methodically rounded out its HCM capabilities and reached critical mass with most of its capabilities, which has prompted many point solution providers to merge and marshal a broader HCM offering. But then, immediately after the PeopleSoft acquisition and the inevitable uncertainty about the product's direction under Oracle, the market has seen prosperity and higher profiles of several niche HR- and HCM-related special applications providers, although Oracle (including its original and PeopleSoft and JD Edwards HR products) remains an undisputed leader in all HCM software categories except for time and attendance (T&A), where Kronos rules.

One should again note that T&A is a segment of broader strategic workforce/talent/human capital management suites, that in most definitions includes at its core the HR, payroll, and benefits modules, which have lately been bolstered with self-service for employees and managers, and similar intuitive applications like a centralized workforce portal that conducts on-boarding and other pertinent functions. Additional applications might include recruitment and staffing, performance and compensation management, appraisals and assessments, learning management, succession planning and career paths, workforce scheduling, and (sometimes) pension administration.

Rounding Out with a Talent Management Acquisition

Infor Global's capabilities in HCM were enhanced by the late-2005 acquisition of Boniva Software, a provider of e-learning, skills management, and performance management applications. The addition of new, complementary HCM functionality expanded Infor's ability to address the growing need among its customers for solutions that support employee recruitment, learning management, competency and skills assessment, and employee performance planning. The Boniva applications were based on a similar SOA, and built using the same J2EE technology as the Infor Open SOA mentioned above. The combined architecture has provided the flexibility to integrate with existing enterprise applications, and to quickly tailor solutions for specific industries.

As for addressing its customers' foremost requirement—accountability and visibility of workforce performance—Infor offers a combination of capabilities like workforce planning and budgeting, HCM analytics and reporting, and talent management. Logically, potential customer benefits should arise from alignment with corporate strategy by combining workforce requirements and business plans. They should also gain the potential for improved decision making through visibility of performance, and the ability to acquire and develop the best talent. To that end, in mid-2006, Infor (formerly SSA Global) announced the general availability of Infor Talent Management 4.5, a comprehensive workforce management solution for midsized and large enterprises.

Infor Talent Management is enabled by many HCM components and cross-integrations, including workforce planning; web-based recruiting; employee performance and competency management; workforce development; succession planning; learning management; and compensation management. The solution was designed for easy integration into core ERP systems, and can be implemented as an Infor Global-hosted solution, or installed as a licensed solution. Its modular format makes it possible to integrate only the required talent management functionality into a customer's existing platforms or services. The solution is double-byte enabled, making it a suitable talent management solution for multinational companies that need to manage a workforce in several countries. Infor Talent Management 4.5 is currently available in English, with plans for localization in more languages in 2007.

User Recommendations

There should be no automatic selection decisions for add-on modules favoring incumbent ERP, HRMS, or HCM providers, but rather the development of a defendable list of HCM requirements that each contesting vendor has to demonstrate. Of course, learning about new features and attractive pricing is beneficial, if only for information and for leverage with other vendors. We suggest evaluating the flashy "bells and whistles," the price, reference sites within the user's industry, and the corporate viability of other vendors, before making a selection. ERP providers like Infor are offering much deeper HCM functionality than ever before, and should be given a serious look by both current and prospective customers, bearing in mind that some best-of-breed HCM vendors may still excel with depth and experience in their horizontal and vertical niches.

An Unusual Human Capital Management Suspect

The most progressive companies have been using best-of-breed human resource (HR) technologies for attracting, hiring, training, motivating, and managing their people. Software applications are getting more and more sophisticated to help companies with these tasks, and as these solutions continue to evolve and communicate with one another, user companies will have more seamless access to methods and data to manage their employees throughout the employee life cycle. On the other hand, laggard companies that do not embrace these technologies will likely fall behind in their quest for market dominance.

There is a true need for much tighter integration between performance management and compensation (regardless of the economic milieu), so that exemplary employees can be rewarded more often, and thus feel truly special to the enterprise. This is vastly preferable to the outmoded blanket-regulated, across-the-board annual "incentive," which typically produces mediocrity. Analyzing the workforce and strategically managing the company's human capital has become the latest focus of human resource management systems (HRMS), as a way to transform these systems from dull functions to applications that greatly affect corporate performance. To that end, integrated business information warehouses enable multidimensional analysis with powerful drill-down features, on information aggregated from internal and external resources (for instance, salary surveys), performance indicators (such as turnover), and views on strategic HR information. Some surveys indicate that almost a third of businesses are already using data warehouses; a quarter of them use workforce performance management or analytics; and one eighth of them are using workforce planning.

This brings us to the notion of human capital management (HCM) or talent management, which Gartner defines as a set of HR practices that focus on the acquisition, management, and optimization of the enterprise workforce. This includes such processes as competency and skills management, succession planning, and team management. The key tenet of HCM is that companies must change their habit of seeing employees as an administrative cost, and instead see them as a strategic investment and key enterprise asset, with a resulting focus on aligning workforce capabilities with business strategy. This more strategic view of the workforce will gradually become less an HR function, and more a management discipline.

HCM should be about value and not cost, since people should be regarded as value-adders and not overheads and liability. It should measure organizational outputs related to better management of people (such as profit, revenue, and service levels), rather than focusing on input measures (such as recruitment costs) or the HR "best practices" of earlier days. According to studies by the Brookings Institute, in the early 1980s tangible assets amounted to over 60 percent of firms' total assets. But now this ratio has been reversed, with over 80 percent of assets being intangible—most of which is represented by human capital. Yet, while decades have been spent investing in automation technologies for better use of tangible assets, only recently have enterprises begun to invest in optimizing human capital.

Vendor consolidation activity continues, both among complementary and competing HCM products (see The Human Capital Management Market—Hot, but also Overpopulated?), and the HCM fray has lately been enriched by Infor, a somewhat unexpected (or under-regarded) HCM aspirant. Infor is a provider of extended enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for manufacturing, distribution, retail, services, and public organizations worldwide (see The Enterprise Applications "Arms Race" To Be Number Three). Although much better known for its manufacturing and supply chain management (SCM) expertise, the vendor has garnered a strong portfolio of HCM applications, mainly stemming from the former Infinium HR and Computer Associates (CA) Masterpiece/HR suites (that came via the recent acquisition of SSA Global), as well as from the recent acquisition of Extensity, which brought the former Geac HR and Payroll solutions. These applications have all achieved strong penetration in some service industries. In fact, Infinium remains the undisputed leader in the hospitality and gaming sector.

In August 2006, Infor announced the general availability of Infor Human Capital Management (HCM) 3.0, a comprehensive solution that aims at helping companies reduce workforce-related costs (which, as mentioned above, can contribute up to 60 percent of any company's total expenditures) and improve workforce productivity. With this product release, the vendor has combined both transactional and strategic HR functionality with integration to its flagship ERP and extensions solutions, so that its customers can better align their HCM initiatives with overall business strategy. The solution is integrated with core Infor Financial Management (Infor FM), Infor Portal, and Infor Workflow, and provides extension solutions such as Infor Corporate Performance Management (Infor CPM). Infor HCM and FM are not only integrated, but also share the same technology foundation.

In tune with the exhaustive market analysis presented in an earlier series, Infor believes that HCM is no longer a back-office function, but rather a key component of a modern extended ERP solution. This solution must be able to add value to uninterrupted business processes, and become a means to enable compliance through organizational alignment. Accordingly, Infor HCM enables companies to automate core processes such as HR, benefits, and payroll, and also offers capabilities including self-service, analytics, and workflow to better connect managers and employees. In other words, the efficiency and effectiveness of a user enterprise's operations and processes can be achieved via both core HR and strategic HCM capabilities, bundled with workflow integration and a workforce portal. Some potential benefits are thus reduced HR costs and time, through business process efficiencies and improved employee communication and productivity. The vendor claims that a vast number of existing customers surveyed have told it that they want to 1) improve workforce performance through accountability and visibility; 2) achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness by adding value to processes and increasing capabilities; and 3) lower total cost of ownership (TCO) through application flexibility and compatibility.

To accommodate the last requirement—lower TCO through application flexibility and compatibility—the suite is built on open standards, including Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and extensible markup language (XML). It can be deployed on multiple platforms, including UNIX (Sun Solaris, HP/UX, and IBM AIX), Microsoft Windows, IBM iSeries, Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS), and Virtual Storage Extended (VSE) mainframe operating systems (OS). It can also be deployed on Microsoft SQL Server, Ingres, Oracle, IBM DB2, Informix, and CA-Datacom databases. Initially available in English only, the product suite has since been internationalized to accommodate multiple language and currency support, and Spanish, French, Italian, German, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese are being rolled out throughout 2007. The product is also slated for continued adoption of the recently released Infor Open SOA (Service-oriented Architecture) (see Contributing to the Rejuvenation of Legacy Systems in the Enterprise Resource Planning Field).

The product already features J2EE-based self-service and talent management (as in learning management and performance management) modules, and a J2EE/XML-based user interface (UI) and integration layers (whereby the integration layer also supports Microsoft .NET). The future should see continued adoption of J2EE, and more modular SOA development. These traits have been provided with potential customer benefits in mind, such as the ability to capitalize on and leverage existing IT infrastructures, and the potential to further meet global requirements. Thus, one should see Infor HCM as a major cross-selling product in the ongoing merger of a few fellow extended-ERP providers (Infor, SSA Global, and Geac); pre-merger Infor's native HCM capabilities have been all but non-existent thus far, despite an immense product portfolio.

Diving a bit deeper into some individual modules, the Infor HR module covers traditional multi-organizational workforce management, multi-job position management, workforce development, training administration, basic recruitment, and salary planning and budgeting. However, the novel Infor e-Recruitment module seems particularly comprehensive in terms of global applicant tracking and Internet-based recruitment, and is taking care of both salaried and hourly hiring support on a single platform. It manages most of the business processes in the web-based staffing process, including requisition management (creation, sign-off, and approval); candidate sourcing tools (including corporate job boards and job cross-posting, and resume parsing and searching); customizable applicant screening and ranking, interviewing, candidate communications, selection and offer generation; hiring and on-boarding; and internal talent management. Also, there is the management of such employment applications as portable document forms (PDFs). The underlying workflow management tools support customized business processes, and the analytic tools provide customized activity and metric reporting.

Infor Benefits Administration provides virtually unlimited benefit program management in terms of benefits plans, providers, and rates. The module identifies appropriate dates for calculating coverage and deductions, provides maintenance of dependent and beneficiary information, and supports flexible benefits plans, such as the definition and maintenance of flexible credits. There is also compliance with the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Infor Payroll is also quite functional with support for payroll and year-end accounting, including compliance with US Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws, and the US W2, 1099, and 1099R forms. It also includes compliance with Canadian T4, T4A, and other germane forms. There is a plethora of earnings and deductions combinations, as well as support for basically any type of payroll period (weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, monthly, and special [executive] pay cycles). Other notable features are possible overrides of earnings, deductions, and taxes; retroactive payroll processing; "compute-a-check" (on-demand payroll and check provision); workers' compensation; absence management; and garnishment tracking and deduction.

Infor Self-service provides four modules:

* Employee Self-service, to update personal and contact information, access learning management, update skills and competencies, and view performance management;
* Payroll Self-service, to view paychecks, submit tax elections, change pay locations, view W2 forms, and view or change direct deposit information;
* Benefits Self-service, to view benefits summaries, view or edit lists of dependents and beneficiaries, perform benefits enrollment, and view or enroll in flexible spending accounts; and
* Manager Self-service, to view employee information and conduct employee status changes, and for performance management and salary planning.

The Infor Learning Management module provides support for many training methods, including instructor-led, online or web-based, computer-based training (CBT), event-based, synchronous, and blended methods. There is integration with leading collaboration platforms such as Centra, Placeware, and WebEx, and a solid online content management repository from multiple internal and external sources. This repository includes a built-in authoring tool and "anytime, anywhere" content development and uploads. The module supports self registration and group registration using credit cards, cost centers, subscription, or purchase orders, while collaboration can take place through discussion forums, e-mails, and chat rooms. There is delivery and tracking of proprietary and standards-based content, including Aviation Industry CBT (Computer-based Training) Committee (AICC) and Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) standards. The module is also integrated with its SSA counterpart modules (Performance Management, Development Planning, and Competency Management).

Last but not least, Infor Employee Performance Management provides the ability for the enterprise to establish objectives and goals, and track them to completion via features like "360-degree feedback" (meaning feedback from all sources connected to the employee), including peer reviews. It also enables automatic calculation of performance review scores based on employee ratings and weight inputs. There is support for formal and informal performance appraisals, based on accomplishment of established goals and attainment of competencies. Again, in this context there is underlying automated workflow (to ease administrative tasks and ensure that performance reviews are completed on time). Other notable capabilities are detailed skills and gap analyses that more clearly identify areas for improvement and development; cascading goals to help users align employee performance measures with those of the organization; and role-based assessment of individual competencies and skills to provide further insight into employee performance. All these capabilities aim at identifying top performers to aid in corporate succession planning.

In a little demonstration of the Infor HCM system at its 2005 Global Client Forum (GCF) user conference, former SSA Global illustrated how the process of bringing new employees on board and deploying them into the organization can be streamlined, with all information set up in internal systems beforehand to ensure that new hires are productive from the first day. This is often a time-consuming, paper-intensive process which results in low engagement during the early days of employment. In the demonstration, a new recruit in the information technology (IT) department has accepted an offer of employment, and needs to become registered in the company's systems. The HR administrator completes an online job hire wizard in the aforementioned Infor e-Recruitment module, and this automatically creates an employee record in Infor HCM 2.0. For speed and efficiency when on-boarding new employees, Infor Workflow will automatically notify various departments to continue the process of setting up the new employee. Accordingly, an e-mail notification is sent to the benefits administrator, and there is a workflow inbox for the administrator which contains the actions necessary to complete the new hire process. By clicking on these links, the administrator can complete the benefits enrolment process for the new employee.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

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